


No Hard Feelings

by sksai



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Evil Clones Getting Up To Mischief, Gen, Lorde Voice: We Told You This Was Melodrama, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Clone Is A Metaphor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-04-07 15:35:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14084064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sksai/pseuds/sksai
Summary: Source(s): Dude just trust me.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I need to spell something out just so nobody gets too scared: This is a story about being an abuse survivor with PTSD and how that isn't always a pretty picture. Finding yourself stuck in a cycle or pattern of abusive relationships does not make you a bad or weak person. Breaking out of that cycle is very difficult and emotionally exhausting work. Being attracted to destructive people and destructive behaviors is unfortunately often part of the process of working through your trauma. As someone who deals with all of this personally, this is not a romanticization of such but a normalization, a validating projection onto characters that make me feel safe. I hope that some of the issues touched on in this story might be able to help anyone else out there with similar backstories as well <3\. TL;DR the clone is a metaphor. EDIT: A LINK IN WHICH I EXPLAIN MYSELF BETTER https://archiveofourown.org/comments/156165948
> 
> Oh and there is no past, present, or future rovinsky at work here. Nor any other romantic entanglements for Special K. Joseph is here because I've never deigned to explore his character in fic before and I love a villain turned awkward friend my guy I love a Klaus sis I love a Zuko honey. It's an AU and we do what we want.

Ronan was scrolling through the feed for the millionth time. His instagram had been private but Henry had hacked it, and the photos they were looking for had been deleted but Henry was able to dig up a cached version of the account, or something like that. He always tuned out all the Mr. Robot mumbo jumbo Joseph and Henry routinely embarrassed themselves by using unironically.

The photos of himself were the most disturbing, obviously. Less disturbing than the ones of the two of them pressed together or kissing, because they were so wildly impossible Ronan could easily process them for what they were, not real. But the ones of just him, looking out the window of a restaurant booth or pulling a face toward the camera, for some reason those were harder to deal with. 

“He’s going to fuck it up,” Joseph mused from where he was sprawled out unnecessarily in the backseat of Henry’s SUV. 

“He’s not going to fuck it up,” Henry replied jovially from the driver’s seat. “You’re not going to fuck it up, are you, Ronan?” 

Ronan was still scrolling through pictures, enraptured with the window into what felt like was an alternate universe. 

“Remember, he’s not going to be happy to see you,” Gansey felt the need to remind him once they’d reached the checkpoint to touch base with him and Noah. Noah and Henry were in the van now “mapping coordinates” which meant one of them was getting their dick sucked, and Joseph had gone ahead to lay the groundwork. “What are you going to say?” 

“I don’t know. I’m planning on winging it.” 

“Ronan,” Gansey sighed. “Be serious, please.” 

He was, unforunately. He didn’t know what the fuck he was supposed to say. He was planning on seeing what kind of reaction his presence elicited before deciding what angle he would go with. He knew the breakup hadn’t been amicable but maybe enough time had passed that a follow up conversation wasn’t out of the question. 

“Threat has been eliminated,” Joseph’s raspy voice crackled from the walkie talkie in Gansey’s hand, which meant he’d been successful in distracting the girl. “You’ve got a clear shot. Go.” 

He recognized Adam Parrish right away, of course. He’d done nothing but stare at his face from various angles for the past three weeks. He felt dizzy with nerves and sick to his stomach, like he’d just gotten on a rollercoaster he knew was going to crash. After all the “intel gathering” — which was what computer nerds called stalking — they’d done, he actually felt like he was confronting a jilted ex-lover. Shoving his complicated emotions on the matter aside, he slid himself into the booth opposite Adam. 

“Hey,” he spoke, voice coming out a much higher octave than he knew his vocal chords were capable of producing. “Sorry to show up like this, but can we talk?” 

** # **

Freezing hot adrenaline surged through Adam’s veins like he’d taken an epi-pen to the jugular. He didn’t have time to think, to speak, to call out for help, to worry about where Blue had gone off to. He just got up and ran. 

“Adam!” He could hear his voice ring out from the entrance of the bar he’d just darted out of. “Wait!” 

Fuck, fuck, fuck. His eyes welled and his heart pounded and his legs felt heavy like he was running through the molasses of a nightmare. He’d been so stupid. Letting his guard down. Letting himself feel safe. Believing that it was truly over. That he’d never stare into those horrifically blue eyes ever again outside of the occasional bad dream. He pulled out his phone while he ran, called Blue. She answered on the second ring. 

“What the fuck?” She shouted over the noise of the bar. “Where did you go?” 

Adam still remembered the day vividly. He’d been working a mid shift at Boyd’s when the car pulled into the lot, a beat up old thing with a shot transmission. The boy behind the wheel had been all smirks and eyelashes and hard edges, and it hadn’t taken Adam long to find his way out from underneath the car and into his bed. He was an asshole, a bastard, and Blue never let him hear the end of it. But Adam could not contain his enamor, lapping up his sick sense of humor and rough way of handling him like a sugary sweet pill that was well worth the hard swallow. 

Adam was no stranger to raised voices, glasses shattering against walls, red faced threats and rules that were made to be broken so he could be punished for not following them. And the first time he took a cold smack to the face from his hot-headed boyfriend, he wasn’t surprised. It seemed to him he was just meant to find these sorts of people, or they were meant to find him, and someone had to give it and someone had to take it. Adam already had eighteen years of practice. It just made sense. 

It wasn’t all bad. Which was a hell of a lot better of a deal than where he’d come from. There were still lazy movie nights and asinine inside jokes. Overpriced lunch dates and holding hands while they walked. 

But when it was bad, it was _bad_. Blue couldn’t bring herself to approve of it, even though Adam left out the physical aspect of what was going on. Adam told her instead that they were both passionate, stubborn people, and this was just the way they sorted things out. She just looked at him like she felt sorry for him, and he began to promptly hate her for awhile. They hadn’t been speaking for months by the time the end came, and Adam really wasn’t sure if she’d even take the call. But she was at the hospital in minutes, it felt like. Like no time had passed, like they hadn’t said awful unforgivable things to each other, and braved the undertaking of collecting Adam’s things. Much later, when he had relocated his right mind, he couldn’t believe he’d allowed Blue to go there by herself and have it out with him. He could have killed her. He would have. He wanted to. Adam, to be honest, didn’t really know why he hadn’t. He could never bring himself to ask Blue what had happened, and she seemed content not to mention it to him, either. She was confident he wouldn’t be bothering Adam again, but solid on the idea that they should hurry along their ten-year east coast living plan. They held their breath all the way to Boston, and slept in the same bed even though there was a whole other room to be occupied. They were afraid, but they were together. 

And then, things were just…okay. Good, even, sometimes. He was a mess, but he wasn’t alone. And he was free, once again. Blue told him surviving twice was something to be proud of, not ashamed. That was something he was still working on. Sometimes the humiliation of what he’d done, what he’d allowed to be done to him, bubbled up in a way that choked him and he was certain the only way out was an entire bottle of his chill pills, but that was something he was working on too. He almost felt normal, some days. And now he was running down a sparsely lit street like a cartoon character, the butt of some offensive joke.

“He found me,” Adam gasped into the phone, his breath trapped painfully in his throat. “Blue, he found me.”

The call dropped, or Blue hung up, and Adam kept running. 

** # **

When Ronan found Adam hunched over, panting with his hands on his knees, he instinctively lifted up his arms and approached him the way he would a trigger happy police officer or a frightened animal. 

“Adam, please just hear me out,” Ronan began but Adam shook his head, backing himself into the wall of the alley he’d run to. 

“I’m sorry for just turning up like that,” he tried again. This guy really did not like surprises. “I just want to talk to you.” 

Adam closed his eyes and sank to the ground, defeated. Ronan opened his mouth to speak again when a high pitched shout erupted from street behind him. 

“What did I fucking tell you, Sam?” 

It was the girl. The one Joseph was now unsuccessfully distracting, barreling toward him with a steak knife in her hand. 

“I told you if I ever saw you again I’d fucking kill you,” she snarled at him, lunging wildly like some kind of berserker on a suicide mission.

“Uh, guys?” Ronan spoke into the minuscule mic Henry had affixed to his jacket. “Gonna go ahead and call a code red now.” 

What had he done, cheat on this guy with his mother? 

Also…

“Sam?” He spat the name aloud, disgusted by its sour taste in his mouth. 

The girl was close enough for one of her blows to leave lasting damage and Ronan barely swerved out of the way in time. Thankfully Joseph had already been hot on her tail and caught her around the waist. 

“You ran off on me, sweetheart. But I love when a girl plays hard to get.” He gritted the last words through strained teeth as he wrangled the knife out of her hand. She growled and bit into the bare skin of his forearm, which he reacted to with a predictably delighted laugh. 

Gansey was next on the scene, thank God, and he crouched down in front of Adam with all the false wisened grace of someone auditioning for the role of a young Jim Gordon. 

“Adam Parrish,” he spoke softly, waiting for the boy to look up at him. “My name is Richard Gansey, and this…” he took Adam by the chin and turned his face to look at where Ronan stood awkwardly, “is my friend, Ronan Lynch. He’s not who you think he is.” 

“Help!” Blue screeched, writhing for her life inside Joseph’s iron-wrought grip. “Help!” 

Gansey winced. “Please don’t scream.” 

“Somebody help us!” She howled desperately. It wasn’t that late and this was a busy part of town. Ronan and Gansey both looked to Joseph expectantly, waiting for him to do his job. He huffed and put his fingers to her mouth, muffling one last scream before she sagged limp in his arms. 

“Well,” he dropped her unceremoniously to the ground. “Now I’m bored.” 

“Blue!” Adam started forward, but Gansey held him back. 

“She’s fine,” he assured him. “Just asleep. I understand how confused you must be right now, but we need you to come with us, and we can explain everything.” 

Adam stood up suddenly, approaching Ronan with a strange, stilted sort of limp, like he was recovering from a fresh wound. He stopped mere inches in front of his face, eyeing him suspiciously, like he was a counterfeit dollar bill. 

“You’re not Sam,” he said. 

“No,” Ronan agreed. “And Thank God for that. He seems like a real piece of work.” 

“Who are you?” Adam asked, not surprisingly unamused.

It was a good question, and not something Ronan was prepared to immediately answer. 

“We don’t have time for this,” Gansey groaned impatiently. “Joseph.” 

Adam was still staring at him when he went out, and fell forward so quickly it was lucky Ronan had the good reflexes to catch him. 

“That’ll be Noah and Henry,” Gansey waved them to the other side of the alley. “Come on.” He came around to wrap one of Adam’s arms around his shoulders to carry him between them, solider-style. The four of them made it halfway down the alley before he realized they were a body short. “Oh, Jesus, Christ, Joseph, pick her back up.” 

“I was waiting for someone to notice,” Joseph grinned, trotting backward to scoop up the girl and sling her over one shoulder. “Ow. She’s heavy.” 

“What the hell did you _do_?” Henry was horrified at the scene he arrived on as the three of them maneuvered Adam as gingerly as they could into the back of the van. “Oh my God, oh my God.”

“He fucked it up,” Joseph told him, gently tucking the girl in behind where Adam’s unconscious body was now stuffed. “Told you he would.” 

**#**

Adam woke up to the politically handsome face of the man who’d introduced himself as Gansey. He wondered if that was his singular role in this group, the pretty pacifier. He smiled at Adam like he was an old friend who’d come for a surprise visit, and it was enough to stall the panic in Adam’s gut as he realized he was tied to a chair…and gagged.

“Don’t panic,” Gansey commanded gently, putting his hands over the tops of Adam’s. “We just didn’t want you to scream. We don’t want to hurt you, Adam. We just need to talk with you. This man you know as,” he glanced back toward Sam—not-Sam—and then back at Adam, “Sam, was it? We’ve been tracking him for a long time with little to no leads and a lot of dead ends. We’re exhausted and we’re ready for this to be over. So you can imagine now that we’ve found you, we unfortunately have to take the extreme route. So, as violence and cruelty is against my very nature, I’d like to take this out,” he tugged on the gag, “but I need to be sure you’re not going to scream.” He winced, like a string on his back was being pulled, and added, “I must remind you that we do have your friend.” 

Fuck. Blue. Adam’s eyes darted around the room, trying to focus, take in his surroundings. The orangey light and sparse white walls alluded to a cheap hotel room. There was no one else present but the three of them, they must have been keeping her in another room. The image of that lanky creep putting his hand over her mouth before she fell limp to the ground played in Adam’s mind and his fists clenched painfully inside his restraints. 

“Adam,” Gansey was unmoved by this. “Are you going to scream?” 

Adam shook his head. He’d complained so much about the way reckless protagonists behaved in action movies that it’d be embarrassing not to follow through with his much more efficient theorized plan. Go along and don’t resist, stay calm until you can clearly see your out. 

“Where’s Blue?” He asked as soon as the gag was removed. 

“She’s being taken care of,” Gansey said with a smile that Adam no longer found calming. He wanted to kick his teeth in. 

“You said you want me to talk,” Adam told him, letting them know he might be willing to oblige them, but he wasn’t a simpering idiot. “I’m not going to talk until I see her.” 

“Jesus,” Not-Sam huffed from behind them, a weary hand draped over his eyes. “This is so fucking out of hand.” 

“You’re the one who called a code red,” Gansey reminded him genially. 

“She was coming at me with a knife!” 

“This isn’t the way we wanted to do things,” Gansey admitted, a rueful frown directed at Adam. “We seem to have…underestimated the situation between you and the duplicate.” 

Adam wasn’t looking at him, his plastic attractiveness now gone stale, but instead studying the man who wasn’t Sam. From farther away, Adam felt almost embarrassed by his reaction at the bar, because he didn’t look very much like him, suddenly. The clothes, first of all, were things Sam would have never been caught dead in. He was more gaunt in the face, but thicker as far as arms and thighs were concerned. He seemed to be looking everywhere but at Adam, chewing on a painted black nail like it was the first meal he’d had in awhile. 

Even so, he might not have _been_ Sam, but he still looked like his alternatively styled twin. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant sight. And when those blue eyes shone down on Adam, just for the fraction of a second, all the panic and nausea returned and he felt like he might pass out. 

“Duplicate,” he repeated dully. 

“Yes,” Gansey replied. “The man you knew as Sam is a duplicate of my friend, Ronan, here. As it seems you can imagine, he’s caused us all a great deal of trouble since his immaculate conception. You’re the first person we’ve found who can provide us with the kind of intimate knowledge of the duplicate we need to aid our efforts.” 

Adam didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but he knew for a fact that Sam was in no way involved with whatever this was. This man, this Ronan, might have been his brother or something, but this way all way too messy for Sam’s hands to be stuck in this somehow. For starters, he would have already killed Blue. 

Speaking of which, he felt the need to repeat, “I’m not going to tell you anything until I see Blue.” 

Gansey thinned out his lips like a disgruntled puppet. Ronan’s voice startled the both of them, “Bring in the girl.” 

Moments later, Blue appeared in the doorway, strutting forward casually, free of any restraints or noticeable injuries, three men trailing haplessly behind her like she was leading them off the edge of a cliff and they were happy to follow. The one he recognized from the alley, the other two, a spritely looking blonde and stocky Asian guy, were unfamiliar additions to this ragtag group of mediocre criminals. 

Blue stopped short when she saw the state Adam was in. She wheeled around on her ducklings. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” 

“This ain’t my department, baby doll.” The tall, dark, and stormy one from the alley nodded toward Gansey. “Take it up with management.” 

Adam wondered if talking like a 1920’s gangster was alley boy’s thing. 

Blue shoved right past Gansey and pulled her signature pink switchblade out of her bra. 

“Really?” Gansey cut his gaze toward the dynamic duo that Adam had yet to be introduced to. 

“I told you we should check her!” The blonde one nudged the other. 

“Yeah, it would have been great to add sexual assault to the charges we’ve racked up tonight,” the Asian boy sneered unhappily at him. “I’ll remember that for next time.” 

As soon as she was finished cutting the last rope around Adam’s chest, she pulled him up toward her, cradling him like he was an invalid, and guided him to sit on the edge of one of the beds in the room, instead. 

“I see you’ve made some new friends,” he murmured flatly. 

“Allies,” she corrected, rubbing at the red skin ringed around Adam’s wrists. “They want to kill Sam, I want to kill Sam, what can I say? We have something in common.” 

“ _Sam_ ,” Alley Guy repeated with a derisive snort. “What a loser.” 

“It’s definitely a time saver,” Blonde Twink shrugged. “We’ve been calling him The Evil Ronan Syndicate.” 

“ _You’ve_ been calling him that,” Asian Guy rolled his eyes. 

Adam found himself strangely charmed by the two of them, their kitschy Abbott and Costello vibe, and thought about suggesting they replace Gansey in the role of buttering up their victims. 

“Are you ready to talk now?” Gansey asked impatiently, further solidifying his theory. 

“What do you already know?” Adam asked, surveying the odd constellation of people spread out before him, ending with a sidelong glance toward his turncoat best friend. 

“I didn’t tell them anything yet,” Blue crossed her arms in offense. “I said it was your story to tell.”

“I was captured,” Ronan surprised everyone by saying, eyes turned down to the floor as he spoke. “There are powerful people that want to use me, use what I can do, for their own ends. When they couldn’t figure out a way to blackmail me or torture me into doing what they wanted, they found a way to…compromise me.” 

It was such a surreally dramatic thing to say Adam was expecting one of his wise-cracking cohorts to have a quip primed and ready, but the lot of them seemed to uncomfortably sober at Ronan’s words, like this was something too serious to tease him about. 

“They’re all Extras,” Blue told Adam, the dubiously impolite colloqialism referring to individuals with enhanced and/or supernatural abilities. Blue had a lifelong grudge against the whole system, since her family of low-level psychics hadn’t qualified for the government benefits and special social status that came with being Enhanced, the powers that be claiming their abilities didn’t meet the intensity criteria to legally be considered one of them. Adam had imagined as much. He’d already gotten a dazzling demonstration of Alley Guy’s sleepytime tea. 

“We don’t know what it is, technically.” Ronan ignored Blue’s insult. “But my DNA was extracted to create it, so clone is the best educated guess. We thought maybe it might be conscious-less, like a zombie or a machine, or something. But then we found out about you.” 

He didn’t look up at Adam, but Adam knew he was addressing him all the same. 

“We put out feelers everywhere, trying to get a hit from someone with my physical description, and finally one of the tips turned us on to you. We found your profile, saw that it had been engaging in a personal relationship with you. So it can think for itself, feel, make decisions, apparently. We don’t know if it’s still under the control of Greenmantle and he just gives it a long leash, or if it’s gone rogue and is acting now on its own accord.” He looked up up now, finally, at Adam. The rush Adam felt at locking eyes with the physical manifestation of his nightmares was part terror, part thrill. There was something wrong with him, after all. 

“That’s all we know.” 

“It’s so weird,” Blue breathed from beside Adam, holding onto his arm as she took in the full sight of Ronan. “You really look just like him. But you’re so… _not_ him.” Though she seemed uncertain as she spoke those last few words.

“What do you want me to tell you, then?” Adam asked, still holding Ronan’s gaze in what felt like some kind fucked up game of chicken. “Seems like you know way more than I do.” 

“Everything we ‘know’ is pure speculation,” Gansey replied with a defeated shrug. “You two have actually spent time with the duplicate, heard it speak, witnessed its behaviors. Anything you can tell us at all about the time you spent in its company would be monumental in terms of our research.” 

“There’s not really much to tell,” Adam answered, dropping his gaze from Ronan’s eyes to his exposed collarbone, drawn to the glinting piece of metal that dangled there. A crucifix necklace, he realized with a bewildered inward scoff. He didn’t know what would be weirder, if it was simply some kind of a punk fashion statement or a genuine object of worship. Sam was not religious, and he hated flashy fashion, and cosmetics, and most things. Adam used to think he was enlightened, too intelligent to be bothered with such plebeian social constructs, and he admired him endlessly for it. But seeing so much naked, unaffected expression pouring out of Ronan from his painted nails to his tailored black jeans to his impassioned way of speaking, Adam had the feeling he’d been eating imitation sugar without realizing raw cane existed. 

“He seemed completely normal, never gave off any creepy clone vibes, so I suppose I’m not much help to your cause, after all.” 

Blue made a throaty noise. “Well, I don’t know about all that. Sure, my first thought wasn’t, hmm, this guy seems like a sci-fi trope, more like, this piece of shit seems like a soulless monster who needs to be sent straight back to hell where he came from. He was definitely not normal.” 

“Well,” The Asian guy, whose name Adam wished he knew so he could stop mentally referring to him that way, looked up from the notes he was taking. “By abnormal we mean more along the lines of what Adam was suggesting. Any signs that point to him being noticeably inhuman in some way or another. Being a piece of shit is kind of the opposite.” 

“Wow, Cheng,” Missing Culkin Brother eyed him moonily. “That was deep.” 

“Can you just take us through your overall experience with the duplicate?” Gansey asked Adam. “From start to finish, sparing no details. Something you may think is nothing could be everything. At this point, we’re desperate for any information at all. So, by all means.” 

Blue looked warily at Adam, who was thinking about his response for a long moment, before he licked his lips and said, “No.” 

He felt Blue’s surprise at his answer, but her grip on his arm tightened, ready to fight to the death to get him out of here if that’s what he was lobbying for. 

“Adam,” Gansey gaped at him imploringly. “Please—” 

“It’s personal,” said Adam. 

“I understand that,” Gansey backpedaled, “But that thing is out there, doing God knows what, wearing Ronan’s face. It has to be stopped. You have to help us. You’re our only hope.” 

“He didn’t do that on purpose,” The blonde piped up with a disappointed sigh. “Which is, in some ways, even more embarrassing.” 

Gansey looked confused, indeed unaware of his unintentional space princess impersonation. Adam caught the tail end of a smirk before it fell from Ronan’s lips. He was hyperaware of those things. The color and shape of them. The surprisingly soft texture despite their perpetually chapped appearance. He wondered, briefly, if Ronan’s lips tasted as identical to Sam’s as they looked. He felt the nostalgic bitter taste of repulsion and attraction twisting up inside him, shaking up his insides into frozen lemonade. There was something sickeningly comfortable about it, familiar like a sunburn. 

And then the feeling evaporated all at once, like a spell being broken, and he was left with nothing but the lingering nausea that came with its absence. It was like waking up with a hangover, hazily reliving all the stupid things you’d done when you were drunk the night before. Shame had a much longer half life than any other substance he’d ever encountered. 

“I don’t have to help you,” Adam corrected Gansey, finally. “I don’t have to do anything.”

Honestly, he just felt sorry for these guys. They were clearly in way over their heads with this shit. They’d accidentally-on-purpose kidnapped two people and then explicitly told their star captive how valuable he was to them. They weren’t going to kill him. They might have tried to use Blue against them, threaten to hurt her if he didn’t give them the information they wanted, but she’d already won the muscle over the same way she got out of speeding tickets and jury duty. He should just tell them all to fuck off and walk out the door. He’d washed his hands of Sam and all the toxic waste he might be leaving in his wake now was not his fucking responsibility. He didn’t like the way Gansey’s voice had gone all condescending, like Adam should care about some stranger with his ex-boyfriend’s face just because Adam knew what it was like to be hurt by him, like it was his duty to provide this humiliating, traumatizing service for the greater good of potential victims that might be out there existing somewhere. 

But unfortunately, he couldn’t say any of that. And he couldn’t just walk out. Not yet, anyway. Because he was curious. 

“You said you wanted to talk to me,” He made sure to fix his gaze on Ronan’s before he spoke. “But you haven’t been doing much of the talking.” 

“Well,” Ronan seemed nonplussed by the accusation. “That was before you ran away from me screaming into the night. I was kind of picking up a standoffish vibe after that, but I don’t know, maybe I’m just paranoid.” 

“In my defense,” Adam replied, “I was under the impression you were my psycho ex-boyfriend and you’d come to finish off a half-assed job.” 

Ronan’s expression shifted from sardonic to utterly blank. 

Curiouser and curiouser.

“I'll tell you everything I can remember,” he told Ronan. “But I’m not doing it in front of an audience.” 

“He’ll have to take down everything you say,” Gansey eyed Adam with suspicion, trying to work out what angle he was trying to play. “We’re not asking questions for our own amusement, you know.” 

“That’s fine,” Adam told him. “I’d just rather not have a room full of faces staring at me while I rehash the most fucked up year of my life I’ve spent the last six months trying to forget.” 

“Fair enough.” Gansey looked suddenly chagrined, like he’d finally realized how much of an insensitive shit he was. He stood up and clapped his hands together. “Let’s give them the room, then.” 

“Are you sure about this?” Blue hissed conspiratorially in his ear. 

“He’s not Sam,” he told her, noting the way she had her eyes fixed on Ronan, like if she blinked he might transform into something else. 

“I know,” she whispered back. “But. I don’t know. Still.” 

“I know what I’m doing,” He lied to her easily. “Go attend to your ladies in waiting.” 

She winked at him, but it was an aborted, skittery sort of movement, like an old fashioned sleepy-eyed doll that'd seen better days. She must have been remembering what it was like the last time she’d left Adam alone with Sam, back when he hated her and she felt sorry for him, and how she blamed herself for how bad things got in her absence. It wasn’t fair, how far the tendrils of trauma could reach. But she left the room anyway, because she respected Adam’s decisions even when she knew they were stupid as hell, which was emotionally admirable though logically unsound. And Adam loved her for that. 

The door clicked softly shut. And then he and Ronan were alone. 

** # **

“I myself am into photography,” Henry stroked an imaginary mustache as he spoke. “And you?”

Joseph’s eyeballs rolled upward, before he held up a finger while he typed something into his phone, made a face, then announced, “I don’t know what photography is.” 

“Rasputin,” Noah guessed. 

“Way too late,” Henry broke character to pat Noah’s knee. “But good try.” 

Blue sighed. This game wasn’t as fun without Adam, who knew the right way to play. They were making it way too easy. She’d always fantasized about what it would be like to sit around on a hotel room floor and get cozy with the dopey men who were holding you hostage. She imagined it would be the perfect combination of _Lolita_ and _Home Alone._ In reality, it was much less exciting. She reached for her own phone, then remembered it had been confiscated. 

“What time is it?” she asked. 

“Isn’t that cheating?” Gansey raised an eyebrow. 

“I mean, right now, in real life,” she grumbled, crossing her arms to let them all know she was pouting and potentially on the verge of tantrum. 

“It’s late,” Joseph answered unhelpfully. 

“What’s taking so long?” 

“Hopefully your friend is being incredibly thorough,” Gansey replied. 

Blue looked between the two of them, troubled that she couldn’t decide which one of them she disliked more. 

“What is it you can do again?” 

Blue understood why the lot of them were card carrying Enhanced members of society. Henry could manipulate electronics, Noah could turn invisible (talk about the superpower lottery), and Joseph could put people to sleep, “among other things”, his words. They must have been the government’s fucking darlings. 

“It’s illegal to not tell me,” Blue reminded Gansey with narrowed eyes. 

“I’m not Enhanced,” said Gansey. “If that’s what your asking.” 

Blue leaned back, satisfied. “Thought so.” 

“I can sense them,” Gansey went on, and Blue frowned. “Which is why I was given the status and title that I have.” 

“Which is?” 

“Manager.” 

Blue wrinkled her nose. “I thought that was a joke.” 

“It was,” Joseph insisted drowsily. 

“So you can tell if someone’s Enhanced?” Blue asked, trying not to sound too interested. “How?” 

“It’s hard to explain,” Gansey sighed, like he was a celebrity on a talk show tired of being asked the same questions over and over. “But it’s not considered a legal Enhancement, due to the intensity criteria, of course.” 

“Of course,” Blue agreed bitterly. Then, making very, very sure not to sound too interested. “Can you sense other people like you? Low-Levels? Or just bonafide Extras?” 

“Why do you ask?” Gansey didn’t too look interested in himself and she had to wonder if he was playing the same game. 

Blue shrugged. “My mom’s a Low-Level psychic. I never got tested, but sometimes I wonder if any of it trickled down.” 

“I’m not picking up any psychic energy from you,” Gansey admitted. “But Low-Levels are harder to sense.” 

“Bummer,” Blue mused, her anxiety effectively quelled for the moment. If someone like Gansey knew what she could really do, evil clones would be the least of her problems. 

“Gansey brought us all together,” Noah beamed, voice full of pride. “There’s not much evidence to prove that teams are worth the money and resources they cost, and they’ve all ended up pretty disastrous so far, but Gansey’s determined to break the mold. Third time’s the charm, right boss?” 

Gansey winced, like a child being embarrassed by a parent. “That’s classified information, Noah.” 

“They must really like you,” Blue suggested. 

“He’s the only manager to ever successfully turn a villain,” Henry held out an imaginary microphone to Joseph. “What’s it like playing for the other team?” 

Joseph leaned in so that his lips were dusting over Henry’s loosely curled fist. 

“I swing both ways.” 

“I think I should go check on Adam now.” Blue changed the subject, feeling suddenly outnumbered and overwhelmed. 

“Check on him?” Gansey asked. “What are you implying?” 

She didn’t know what the deal between Gansey and Ronan was but it seemed possibly similar to the deal between herself and Adam. She realized with belated insult to herself that this made her the Gansey to Adam’s Ronan, and silently chafed. 

“I just want to make sure he’s okay,” she said. 

“Alright,” Gansey relented. “We’ll go together.” 

She felt silly, walking the very short spanse of hallway that stretched between the room she’d be in and the room Adam was in currently. If anything bad was happening, she would have been able to hear it. 

Or not, apparently, because when Gansey pushed the door open the two of them now looked on into a suggestively empty room. 

Adam and Ronan were gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I forgot to mention in the first chapter that Blue and Adam were visiting in new york ( for spring break i guess), which is where all superheroes are based, obviously, when the gang found them.

Ronan’s head was tilted downward, eyes trained to the lined paper he was ineffectually scratching things onto. The worst part was that Adam seemed to be getting some kind of sick satisfaction out of this, like he was tuned into Ronan’s nervous system and found was he saw in there amusing. He might as well have been stretched out naked, positioned for a portrait Titanic-style, because that’s how hot Ronan’s skin burned every time he looked up. Listening to this story was like watching Adam slowly undress himself and everytime Ronan asked a question, probing for clarification or more information, he was reaching out to speed up the process with his own two hands.

“How long ago did this happen?” Adam turned the tables around every once in awhile, and Ronan had no choice other than to appease his curiosity.

“Almost two years,” Ronan mumbled back in response, shading in his rudimentary 3D box.

Adam scoffed. “He didn’t waste much time.”

Ronan didn’t have a response for that. This was somehow weirder than he’d anticipated, strange considering he’d anticipated it being plenty fucking weird.

“And you’ve never actually, like, met him?”

“Not formally.”

“Hmm.”

Ronan looked up at that, regretting his decision immediately. Adam’s eyes were what a romance novel would describe as _stormy_ , and his gaze _penetrative_.

“Was Sam created with your memories? Like, does he think he’s you?”

“I assume if he did, he wouldn’t have chosen such a downgrade for a name.” Ronan responded, thoroughly chafed. “Did he ever mention anything about family?”

“He said he didn’t have any,” Adam said. “But I suppose he could have just been saying that. I don’t know.”

Ronan was relieved though he knew Gansey would consider this a huge loss. They needed something, anything, that could give them an edge over what had been created to be an unstoppable killing machine would be better than what they currently had, which was nothing. Any potential chink in armor. If the duplicate thought Ronan’s family was its own, maybe he had feelings for them. Maybe he could be reasoned with, or bribed, or tricked, just long enough to destroy. There was a time when Ronan had sympathy for it, it hadn’t asked to be created, after all. But no one had forced it to do what it had done to Adam. It was much easier now for him to imagine it wiped cleanly from existence.

“Did he ever mention anything about being Enhanced?” Ronan was ready for the subject to change.

“No.”

“Did you ever suspect that he was?”

“No,” Adam said. “Well. In what way?”

Ronan shrugged. “Any way.”

“I mean,” Ronan saw Adam’s head tilt out of the top periphery of his vision. “I’d kind of have to know what it is I’m supposed to be retroactively looking for, don’t you think?”

His voice took on a strange quality, it slowed down and dripped like thickening syrup, sweetened by the lilt of an unfamiliar accent.

“It’s a big secret, huh?” Adam teased at Ronan’s silence.

Ronan crossed his arms, studying Adam with newfound confidence. It was hard to believe the terrified boy in the alley was the same one that was smirking at him from across a hotel room now. Fascination cracked through his spine like it was a whip. Who was this person?

Adam had spent the last twenty minutes emotionally undressing himself for Ronan’s shamelessly hungry eyes. It was only fair that he even the playing field. It was horrifically illegal, which was one of Ronan’s favorite states of being. He stood up and motioned with a jerk of his chin for Adam to follow him as he strode out to the small balcony jutting from the right sight of the room. Ronan perched himself eagerly on the edge of the railing, fists gripping the cold, damp metal on either side of him, practically kicking his feet by the time Adam had taken the scenic route from the bed to the open doorway. He leaned against it, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.

“Let me guess, you’re gonna jump down.”

Adam didn’t sound very impressed. Now Ronan had to think of something better to do.

He sighed and uncurled his fists, letting his body fall backward and plunge headfirst toward the ground. Years of having to share a trampoline with two brothers made it easy to curl up his knees and flip himself around in enough time so he’d land gracefully on his feet. When he looked up, Adam was peering over the railing at him, one hand propping up his chin.

“Is that it?”

“Like to see you try.” Ronan squinted up at him, a lopsided smile crooking its way onto his face.

“You’ve got me there,” Adam admitted, opting instead for the boxy winding of coated black stairs that snaked down to the ground. Ronan felt a sudden strangeness, one that he was still getting used to. It came on like a vision in slow motion, except he wasn’t literally seeing anything out of his eyeballs, but his brain was telling him it was happening, and the urge to act seized his entire being with what Henry referred to as souped-up OCD.

He caught Adam around the waist just as he tripped, his heart thundering in his chest like he’d just outrun a train. He felt like he’d just been shoved off a merry go round pushed to its limit and shuddered out a shaky, nauseous breath. Super speed wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

“Typical,” Adam grumbled, flushed in the cheeks, his hands still clawed in the instinctive grip they’d taken to the hem of Ronan’s shirt. Ronan let himself be hastily shoved off and lingered on the landing for a moment before following Adam down the rest of the stairs.

“I think I would have noticed if Sam could do that.”

“He can’t,” Ronan revealed proudly. “This isn’t what I do.”

“My imagination knows no bounds,” Adam replied airily. He was funny. Ronan hadn’t been expecting him to be funny. Not his kind of funny, anyway.

“After I was compromised,” Ronan continued as they walked, “To give me an edge over the duplicate, I was cleared for some add-ons.”

Adam shook his head, tsking like an old woman sitting on her porch watching a scantily clad young woman stroll by.

“It’s not what you think,” Ronan said. “Not what the conspiracies make it out to be. It won’t last forever unless I keep getting it re-upped, and there’s not enough scientific data to conclude whether or not that would, you know, extremely kill me.”

“You must be planning to kill _me_ ,” Adam slid him a sidelong glance. “The masses would go fucking rabid if they knew post-birth enhancements were real.”

“It’s not like anyone would believe you,” Ronan reminded him. “You have no proof.”

“Curing cancer’s really taken a backseat, I guess.” Adam replied with bitter superiority. “But at least my tax dollars are paying for a night of entertainment.”

The heat of the blow was kind of dampened by the fact that Adam’s tummy had chosen that moment to growl like a mewling kitten. Ronan snickered and Adam crossed his arms over his stomach, betrayed by his own biology.

“I need to eat something too,” Ronan confessed, breathing in the cool night air like it was ginger ale. “I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

 

*******

“And what part of the plan is this?”

Maybe Gansey had lied. Maybe he could sense her and wanted to blackmail her into joining his motley crew. She’d do it, she’d do anything, just pull back the curtain and show her Adam and they could all have a nice laugh about how easy it was to trick her.

“It’s not,” Gansey hissed through gritted teeth, and spun back around, already speaking to Henry as if he could hear him.

“We need to move.”

“What’s going on?” The door opened before they made it back to the other room and the ducklings filed out, comically ready for action.

“Ronan’s going on,” Gansey just kept walking, past the door, expecting them all to follow, which they did.

“I’ve got a few theories,” Henry jogged up beside him. “But given Ronan’s track record you’re still going to have to narrow it down for me.”

Gansey and Henry started bickering as Gansey explained the disappearing act and Henry seemed to be on the verge of blowing a gasket out what a ridiculous night this had turned out to be. Noah was trying to mediate, and while they were all distracted amongst each other, Blue began to map her way out of this. The novelty of playing Kidnap-Me-Barbie TM had worn thin and she was ready to take matters into her own hands. The police would be able to find Adam faster than these goons and they’d wash their hands of this whole mess. As much as she wanted to be there to see Sam take a bullet right between the eyes, she was content in knowing it would happen without her, if these idiots ever got their shit together.

She trotted along behind the pack, letting herself fall quietly farther and farther behind them until she could no longer hear their frantic chattering, and slid unnoticed in the opposite direction.

Or so she thought.

“Hey, where’s the girl?” One of them shouted bewilderedly into the crisp night air.

A hand clasped around her wrist and yanked her upward from where she’d had the quick sense to crouch down behind a large white car parked at the edge of the lot.

She did not resist as Joseph’s height difference on her had her practically dangling in his grip. She still had herself on these guys good sides and violent desperation wouldn’t begin until talking her way out of it ended.

“She was checking out my rims,” Joseph told them, dropping her hand in a way that felt more predatory than the way he’d been clutching it. “Guess she wants to ride with me.”

She very much did not want to do that. But she’d already made a weird, suspicious spectacle of herself and she needed them to think she was stupid and pliable, not rerouting her escape. He also was the one who still had her phone. So she laughed liked she’d just been being a classically silly girl and let herself be herded around to the other side. There was an icy tremor of fear dripping down her spine as the door slammed beside her, and she felt suddenly extremely small in the large dark interior of this unfamiliar vehicle being helmed by an unfamiliar person who had the power of super-roofies at his fingertips.

Whatever. She’d been small all her life. And every other guy she’d ever been stupid enough to choose to be alone with was just as dangerous. She could handle herself.

She’d been pointedly looking out the tinted window into the dulled view of the whipping scenery passing by, reminding herself that she was strong and capable and knew how to fight her way out of several different body holds, when the startling sound of music filled the car all at once. It wasn’t the volume or the way it vibrated the entire car that was disorienting, but the content itself, which seemed to be some kind of bass-boosted twinkly children’s song about going to the dentist.

“What is this?” she shouted over the electronic kazoo.

“Talking only brings the toothaches on because I say the stupidest things,” Joseph sang along to the track, ignoring her. “So if my results go south, I swallow my pride with an aspirin and shut my mouth.” The last few words seemed to be directed at her with a half-hearted manic sort of emphasis.

“Is this…Owl City?” Blue replied, the now familiar voice of the singer unearthing her long unboxed memories of low rise skinny jeans and sweatbands stretched across heavy bangs.

“Aren’t you supposed to be good at finding clues, Blue?” Joseph drummed out the melody on the steering wheel in front of him, still singing along and behaving as if he was the only person in the car. Blue in turn ignored the ridiculous comparison to the cartoon dog she hadn’t gotten since elementary school and stared at the black digital lettering scrolling across the illuminated blue screen of the radio. DENTAL CARE.

What? That was supposed to be a clue? A clue to what, anyway? Was this his way of distracting her so she wouldn’t have time to think about how she was going to get her phone back and get the hell away from him? And yet her mind began sifting through words like puzzles pieces. dental care? dentist? doctor? visit? braces, flossing, brushing your teeth, gums, bleeding, chewing, biting,

Oh.

Fuck.

Joseph seemed pleased by the look on her face, which didn’t surprise her, because he seemed like a mostly unbalanced person who took pleasure in exclusively ironic ways.

They merged onto a highway and Joseph took his hands off the wheel to peel back the sleeve of his jacket on the arm where she’d bitten him.

She couldn’t stop the bile that rose in her throat and had to slap her hand over mouth. Greenish brown puss oozed out of crusty blackened punctures dotted along Joseph’s forearm.

“You should be dead by now,” was the first thing that came to mind. She didn’t know this because she’d ever killed someone before, but she did have a lifetime of experience that added up to enough evidence to back up this theory.

“Huh,” Joseph smirked, like he was happy with this information and not horrified like a normal person would be. “It must be all the gatorade I drink.”

Blue, now a potential murderer, was not in the mood for brevity.

“You couldn’t have picked a less dramatic way to show off your healing power?” she mused with frantic hope.

“Regenerative,” Joseph corrected her. “But I’ve stitched up gunshot wounds faster than this. This hasn’t even closed yet.” He squeezed at it to create an even more grotesque picture than what had been there previously. “So what’s the tea?”

Blue didn’t exactly know the entire ins and outs of her, as her morbid aunts liked to refer to it, delicate condition. The research Mr. Gray had been doing since Blue was a little girl and had asked her mom why food tastes so bad and makes you sick when you chew on it for too long had only been able to calculate how potent it was, not what it was as a substance. And there were, up to current results, no known treatment to even stop, let alone heal, the damage it caused.

“It’s my saliva,” she told him, steeling herself because she assumed his next question would be something along the lines of demanding how he fix it, but was instead something just as pointless in a much more annoying way.

“What happens when you suck a dick?”

She growled low in her throat. “Wanna find out?”

He sighed dreamily. “We don’t have time for that tonight, unfortunately.”

It was at this point Blue realized they’d been driving for a decent amount of time on the highway and not exiting. The van with the rest of the boys was nowhere in sight. Her heartrate spiked.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Do you want me to help you fix your arm or not?”

She was bluffing, of course, because nothing would fix it. He was lucky he had a power that kept the infection localized for a long enough time that he could cut off his arm before it spread to the rest of his body and ate him up from the inside out.

“Good try,” he scoffed. “But if you wanna pull that card you gotta make sure you don’t have any pretty boys you wouldn’t mind getting roughed up on your account.”

Now it all made sense. This was a fucking trap and she’d walked right into it. “What’s Ronan doing with Adam?”

“Ew,” Joseph wrinkled his nose. “I don’t wanna think about that. I mean, I used to think Ronan was hot, but then I had a dream that he married my grandpa and turned him into a hamster and then cooked the hamster and made me eat it and now when I look at him I just think about eating my hamster grandpa and—”

“I could bite you again,” Blue realized suddenly. “Even if you held me down I could still spit.”

“Now you’re getting it,” he praised her with a rousing slap against the steering wheel. “You got that on me, baby doll. But I still have this.”

“Stop calling me—” was all Blue got out before the ghostly sensation of cold fingertips pressed to her exposed neck was the last thing she felt before plunging headfirst into darkness.

 

*******

 

Adam’s palms were itching.

Well, maybe that wasn’t quite the right word. What was the word for when it feels like insects are buzzing around inside your palms? When your blood feels fuzzy and pulled thin, like holding a magnet just far enough away from the fridge to feel it pulling out of your grip.

He wanted to touch Ronan. Poke him like he was a ghost in a cheesy movie. Slide their fingers together. Grab him around the neck and press their chests together.

Just to see what would happen.

It was a fantasy as nauseating as it was thrilling, like the weird phenomenonal intrusive thought of _what would happen if I just crashed my car into a building right now?_

“What do you want?” Ronan’s voice nudged Adam away from his dizzying thoughts.

He reluctantly parted with his private masochism to relay his order to the comically unimpressed cashier behind the counter. It was the middle of the night, he probably thought they were high and therefore going to be loud and annoying.

Adam wasn’t the type to be loud or annoying, even when the cashier read the total and Adam knew that wasn’t possible, because his Taco Bell order hadn’t changed in years and he knew it didn’t cost that much.

“Um,” he started to politely air his grievance, before Ronan slid a card into the chip reader and the cashier handed him one long receipt, which Ronan promptly crumpled up and threw in the trash.

There wasn’t anything weird about Ronan putting their orders together. He was probably just being polite. Or saving time. And he definitely didn’t knock their knees together on purpose as they sat down across from each other. He just had long legs. If he pulled them back he wouldn’t be able to sit comfortably. There was really no need for the gesture to make Adam’s neck feel hot. If anything, he should feel afraid. He was alone with a stranger who had lured him out into the night, isolated and far away from anyone who could help him.

And yet there was still the undeniable other side of it. That he’d been picked for something. That he was special.

Sam used to make him feel like that.

He felt suddenly like he’d aquired Blue’s unfortunate curse, as the food in his mouth tasted all at once spoiled and he felt his gag reflex trigger. He swallowed it down, anyway.

“Are you doing this on purpose?” Ronan asked him. “Or are you really that uninterested in me?”

Adam blinked at him, completely taken aback by both questions. It was weird, because it sounded exactly like something Sam would say when he was angry with him and Adam wasn’t being very good at guessing why. But the timbre of Ronan’s voice was higher, it had a sort of musical quality to it. And the look on his face was mischeviously bashful, like the strawberry color in his cheeks wasn’t just from their icy walk all the way here.

Adam was in danger, he knew that, but he wasn’t afraid. He was stupid, but that didn’t come as a surprise to him either.

“On the contrary,” he licked the salt from his lips. “I’m very curious about you.”

Something pulsed in the air between them. Ronan shrugged out of his leather jacket and stood.

“I have to pee.”

Adam scoffed under his breath, softly amused, then instinctively reached for his phone to appear less awkward before remembering he didn’t have it on him. Ronan had given it back to him upon his request, before the interrogation started. He must have left it in the hotel room.

There really was something fucked up inside him that just never wanted to be safe. He always worked best when there were no ways out.

He felt sleepy, dizzy, masochistically malleable. He needed to do something with his hands. His food was only half eaten but he got up to dump the contents of his and Ronan’s trays into the trashcan, clattering them loudly on the marbled slab above. The sound startled him halfway out of his head-heavy haze and he slumped back into the booth on the wrong side. His ass was digging uncomfortably into something chunky and sharp. He looked down to see Ronan’s discarded leather jacket trapped twisted underneath him. He tugged it loose, folded it nicely into his arms, and made his way to the men’s room.

“What the—Jesus!” Ronan jumped like he’d been bitten by a rattlesnake, hurrying to zip up his jeans out of Adam’s line of sight.

Adam had been staring. He’d accepted the nail polish, the I was an extra in the film _Pride_ outfit, the super powers. But this? This just seemed like overkill. He stepped closer, unbothered by Ronan’s alarm, and pressed his thumb against the spiky edge of what appeared to be a sprawling back tattoo underneath Ronan’s tanktop. He slid his thumb down, slowly, like he was expecting the ink to smudge.

He was also expecting Ronan to be rearing back, moving to shove him backward or punch him in the face. That seemed like a reasonable reaction, given that Adam has snuck up on him and was now accosting him in a Taco Bell men’s room. Instead he stayed purposefully still, breathing evenly, like he was having his blood drawn at a doctor’s office.

“I’m not Sam,” he told Adam quietly. His eyes were closed.

“Never said you were,” Adam replied, still fixed on the obscured tattoo.

Ronan turned then, chest to chest with Adam, and silently reached for the folded up jacket in his hands. He held Adam’s indecipherable gaze with just as much ambiguity, fluidly reattaching the jacket back onto his body.

It felt like a challenge. It felt like a warning.

“You ready to go?” Ronan asked, brisk, like this was a completely normal exchange to be having.

Adam nodded, dazed, and followed Ronan back out into the night.

 

*******

 

“I can take things out of my dreams.”

They’d been walking for such a long time Adam had almost forgotten he wasn’t alone.

He stopped. “What?”

Ronan kept walking. “That’s my power. The one I was born with. The one Sam was created to have.”

Adam’s brain still hadn’t fully processed the response, but he jogged to catch up with Ronan anyway. “What does that mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Ronan huffed, like he was being forced to recount an embarrassing story from his childhood. “If I dream something, I can take it out.”

“I don’t,” Adam’s brow furrowed, “really understand how that’s a power.”

Ronan snorted with derision. “Aw, stop, you’re making me blush.”

“You could try explaining it like a normal person.”

“I’m not normal,” Ronan argued.

“Hence the word _try_.”

Ronan snorted again, this time sparing Adam a backward glance.

“You’re kind of a dick, you know that?”

Adam couldn’t control the downward slip of his facial muscles and Ronan cleared his throat before pulling his head back around. “Didn’t say it was a bad thing. Just not what I was expecting.”

Expecting? What was that supposed to mean? The variety of implications slid into Adam like cold water in an otherwise empty stomach.

“Stop trying to distract me,” he replied, shaking himself free of the bramble inside his brain. “How do you ‘take something’ out of a dream?”

Ronan stopped walking, regarded Adam curiously, like he’d said something in a foreign language that sounded pretty, but he couldn’t be sure.

“I could show you,” he said. Adam caught up to his side.

“You can fall asleep on command?” Adam raised a dubious eyebrow.

Ronan lips curled into a crooked smirk. It was such an unfamiliar expression on an all too familiar face.

“What’s something you’ve always wanted?” Ronan asked, continuing forward once again, this time at a slower, leisurely pace. “Something you knew it was impossible to get.”

Adam pondered the question though he was annoyed at Ronan’s smooth evasiveness.

“Well, I’d have to explain the story behind it.”

Ronan cut him another one of those looks, like he needed to be reading Adam’s lips to fully grasp what he was saying.

“Go on, then.”

“I can’t remember how old I was exactly,” The cold air was starting to burn in his lungs, making his breath taste coppery. “Maybe like, six? Or…no…maybe more like four. No, not that young. Never mind, I can’t remember. But young enough that mom couldn’t leave me at home alone. She had this job interview at the mall and she had to take me with her. When we got there, she told me to go find some place to play while she was busy and to meet her back at the entrance in an hour. I’d never been to the mall before, so I had no idea where to go. Eventually I came across this store that looked like,” he shook his head, struggling to find the words to explain what had happpened in his child sized brain. “I don’t know. It looked like magic. It looked like Heaven.” He scoffed, embarrassed. “It was the Disney store.”

Ronan said nothing, and Adam didn’t dare gauge his expression, so he stared straight ahead and kept talking.

“I’d never seen anything like it. I felt like I was in a different world. The only Disney movies I’d seen had been the ones they showed us at school, so I didn’t recognize a lot of the stuff in there. But I wanted it anyway. All of it. Any of it. I just wanted something to remember that I’d been there, because I knew I’d never be in a place that wonderful ever again.” He cleared his throat, uninvited emotion stirring up in there. “I didn’t have any money, obviously, so I couldn’t. I thought about stealing something.” He couldn’t help but chance a split second glance toward Ronan, whose face seemed to be nothing but impassive, maybe he was waiting for the story to get to the point. “I was too scared of getting caught, though. Anyway, so I just kept walking around, memorizing everything I could, hanging around other parents and their kids so it looked like I was with them and someone wouldn’t spot me and kick me out. I was lingering behind this woman with a little girl, she was reaching up to grab this huge thing off a high shelf so the little girl could see. She caught me staring and smiled at me, motioned me closer so I could look at it too.

“It was that thing from Beauty and the Beast, I’d seen that movie at school so I knew what it was. That glass with the rose inside it. The woman told the girl to press the button on the side, but she shook her head, moving to pick up a nearby shield and sword instead. She wasn’t very impressed by it I guess.” Adam scoffed fondly at the memory. “So the woman told me to press it. When I did, the rose inside lit up, just like in the movie. I jumped back, like I’d seen a fucking ghost, and the woman laughed, but it wasn’t a mean laugh. It reminded me of magic, too. Just like everything I’d seen and heard in that place. ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ she asked me. I shook my head. Pretty didn’t even begin to cover it. I must have said something else, because she nodded at me, before putting it gingerly back up on the shelf. I felt weird, like there was too much of something inside me and it was about to spill out. I needed to go meet my mom at that point, anyway, so while she was distracted I just slipped out of there, before she could do something horrible like ask me where my parents were or if I was okay or something. I remember hating that little girl. I couldn’t believe how stupid she was, how ungrateful. Someone wanted to give her that thing, and she didn’t care. Didn’t even want it. I couldn’t imagine what that felt like, to not _want_ something.” Adam shrugged, his voice starting to gravel up from talking so much. “So yeah, that’s my most wanted thing I guess.”

“To not want?” Ronan asked.

Adam narrowed his eyes at him, baffled as to how he came to that conclusion.

“No. I wanted the rose. In the glass.”

Ronan took in this information, then shook his head, like Adam was endlessly frustrating.

“As much as I could compliment you on your cinematically sharp memory, that’s not what I meant.”

“Huh?”

“I meant something _impossible_ ,” Ronan ground out, like he was loathed to make this distinction. “Something that couldn’t exist in the real world. A car that never runs out of gas, a gun that never runs out of bullets.”

“Ah,” Adam blanched. “I see how that’s a power an evil syndicate might be a bit thirsty for.”

“You can’t think of anything like that?” Ronan seemed anxious, like something important depended on Adam’s answer.

He hated to disappoint, but his brain was blusteringly empty. “Not really.”

Thankfully they’d made their way back to the hotel parking lot which meant it must be time for the conversation to turn back to Sam.

Ronan’s pace stopped abruptly short, scanning the sparsely occupied parking lot like a prey animal on high alert.

“What?” Adam asked. "Your spidey senses tingling?”

He was expecting another one of Ronan’s prickly snorts or crooked grins, but his eyes stayed wide, flicking all around.

“What’s wrong?” Adam crossed his arms, skin splintering in the cold.

“They’re gone.”

Adam dropped his arms. “What?”

He extracted his phone from his back pocket. “Fuck.” He pressed something and held it up to his ear.

“What the fuck?” he repeated into it.

“I’m here,” he said after a moment. “At the hotel, dumbass.”

His eyes flicked toward Adam for a moment, then down to the ground. “Nothing.”

Adam’s blood bristled. It was strange how one word brought on such a visceral reaction inside him.

“You _what_?” Ronan’s voice reached an octave that made Adam wince. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

“What am I supposed to—” His body shifted imperceptibly toward Adam again, then stilled. “No.”

A long stretch of silence followed.

“Oh my God,” Ronan growled into the phone. “Whatever. Bye.”

“Wh—” Adam started, but Ronan blew past him, roughly pushing the entrance door open and stalking through the lobby at a uselessly thumping pace, and Adam had no choice but to follow him.

*******

“What was that about?” Adam asked, the hotel room door clicking shut softly behind him. “On the phone. What’s going on?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ronan said, because he didn’t want to lie. “We just need to hurry this along.” Two separately true statements. He didn’t want Adam to worry and they did need to get through the rest of this ridiculous interview. Together, they might have implied something untrue, but that was out of Ronan’s hands.

Adam returned to his previous position on the edge of one of the hotel beds. Ronan sat back down in his designated place, an honorable distance away, and picked up his note-taking tools. He pretended to be skimming over what he’d already written down, but his eyes couldn’t focus. He wasn’t thinking about what he’d already covered and what he still needed to ask. He was thinking about Adam, how strange he was, how much this entire thing felt like an enormous mistake that was not only unmendable, but would only continue to fester like an unhealing wound. He was thinking about the pictures, how happy he’d seemed with Sam, how far from the truth that actually was, and what that meant.

He was thinking about the way Adam asked how his powers worked, and how weird that was. No one had ever asked him that before. They didn’t care how it worked, they just wanted to know what he could do with it. What kind of services he could provide.

He was thinking about the thing in the bathroom, the way Adam had touched his tattoo.

“They lost Blue.”

The confession just spilled out of him like some kind of survival reflex. Adam’s ocean colored eyes snapped up, suddenly feral.

“What?”

“They went looking for us,” Ronan swallowed. “Blue went with Joseph in his car. But they lost them on the road and they don’t know where they went.”

Adam stood up, any and all sultry shyness drained and replaced with vengeful disdain.

“You lied to me.”

Ronan breathed out, closed his eyes. “I didn’t want you to worry. I’m sure she’s fine. Apparently she wanted to go with him.”

“Bullshit,” Adam spat at him. “Where’s my phone?”

“They’ve already tried calling him. I guess he had Blue’s phone too. But they didn’t know the number.”

“So I’ll call her.”

“Adam—”

“If there’s nothing to worry about,” Adam sneered sourly at him, “then I’m sure she’ll answer.”

When she predictably did not, Adam wheeled around on Ronan, unflinching. “Give me your phone.”

Ronan sighed, but complied.

He watched Adam locate Joseph’s number in his contacts and attempt to call, and call again, and call again. He growled in frustration and then his thumbs went to work, rapidly typing out something that Ronan knew he didn’t want to read. He waited, typed something again. Brought the phone back up to his ear to call.

“Adam—” Ronan tried, but it was good that Adam cut him off, because he didn’t really know what he was going to say after that, anyway.

“He has to answer eventually,” Adam reasoned. “He’s your lackey isn’t he? Shouldn’t he be ready when you say jump?”

“He’s been unprecentedly resistant to housetraining,” Ronan sighed.

“Don’t you Extras have tracker things or whatever?”

“He took his out.”

Adam sat down, chucking Ronan’s phone to the thankfully carpeted floor with uncaring malice.

“I can’t believe I actually thought you were different.” Adam seemed to have meant to say that silently inside his head.

Ronan took offense regardless. “Hey, this isn’t my fault.”

“You were perfectly fine with letting me sit here not knowing Blue was in danger.”

“She’s not in danger,” Ronan insisted, an extremely annoying defensive flame ignited inside him. “I know Joseph seems like a freak, and well…he is, but he wouldn’t hurt her.”

“He’s a killer,” Adam assumed. Correctly.

“Reformed,” Ronan reminded him, realizing he was only making the situation worse. But it was fucked beyond repair, anyway, so it hardly mattered now.

“You—”

A ping sounded beneath them. Adam grabbed for the phone faster than Ronan could get to it. His flourescently fair eyebrows furrowed together. Ronan crossed the threshold of hatred between them and sat next to Adam on the edge of the bed.

_It’s Blue. I’m okay._

“I don’t believe it,” was Adam’s unsurprising response.

Ronan watched in silence as Adam typed back in all capital letters _PROVE IT._

 

*******

 

Blue’s mouth was dry, and her head was too heavy. She hated waking up before she felt like it, and willed her eyelids to stop blinking. Whose alarm was going off? She never set an alarm. It didn’t sound like Adam’s. It was too close. And Adam wasn’t here. Adam was with Ronan.

Blue’s body jerked upright, heart-poundingly awake, blinking through rain spattered windows and the horrifically incessant ding-ding-ding-ding of a car with a door open while the engine was running.

“There she is.” Blue turned to see Joseph facing her with white rimmed sunglasses covering his eyes, sipping from a straw in a Starbucks iced coffee.

“I would have got you one,” he told her with a sheepish shrug. “But I didn’t want to wake you.”

“How considerate,” Blue snarled. She whipped her head around, squinting in the dark. It looked like they were in some kind of suburban rich people complex thing. Lots of big white houses and nicely paved roads. “Where are we?”

Joseph cut the engine and pushed himself out of the car. “Jersey.”

Blue scrambled out of the passenger seat with much less grace, slamming the door thoughtlessly behind her. “What do you mean, Jersey? As in, New?”

“Keep your voice down,” Joseph hushed. “People are sleeping.”

“Take me back,” Blue demanded. “Or I’ll scream.”

“You’re not going to do anything I don’t want you to do,” Joseph told her, which fired up a rage inside her she hadn’t known since a boy in kindergarten had spilled a jar paint all over her dress after she had declined his offer to share a bag of animal crackers with him at recess.

“That is,” Joseph turned around, pulling up his jacket sleeve to expose his arm again. “Unless you _want_ Gansey and the government to find out about your poison ivy.”

There it was. Of course. How could Blue have missed it? This didn’t have anything to do with Ronan and Adam’s disappearance. And no one had been on this with him. He was working alone and brought Blue along for the ride.

Because he wanted to use her power.

And her power wasn’t something that had two ways about it.

It killed people.

“I won’t do it!” Is what Blue should have tearfully shouted at him, like a strong female character in a movie. But the alternative was her power falling into the hands of powerful people, powerful people who had even less qualms about killing, and who were smart enough to realize Blue’s power was something that could be bottled up and inflicted without her needing to be present. They’d lock her up somewhere, torture her, blackmail her, using her up until maybe they even found a way to replicate the substance, and then what? They’d have no use for her. And they couldn’t just let someone with that kind of power walk away, could they? No, no. They’d have to dispose of her, of course. Quickly and quietly and no one would ever know. And what about her family? Well those were loose ends, after all, too. They could talk, make a big fuss in the press. That just wouldn’t do. Get rid of them, too. What a great idea—

A familiar sound shocked Blue out of her hysterical spiraling. “That’s…that’s my phone.”

Joseph was already walking again.

“Give me my phone.”

“Not til we’re done.”

Another sound went off and Joseph pulled his own phone out of the breastpocket in his jacket to silence it. It went off again and he ignored it. The third time he stopped in the middle of the street, cursing under his breath.

“It’s your boyfriend,” he informed her, cruelly pleased. “He’s worried.”

At least Adam was okay. If this was her last moment as a somewhat good person, it was nice thought to go out on. The phone went off again and Joseph silenced it once more.

She wondered why he didn’t just turn it off, but she wasn’t about to be the kid who reminded the teacher about the homework.

“He won’t stop until he hears from me. Just let me tell him I’m okay.”

“There,” Joseph flashed the screen toward her, showing her what he’d written in reply.

“Like that’s believable,” Blue scoffed. “Let me talk to him.” She reached for the phone, but he shoved her off.

“I’ll do the talking here,” Joseph said, which wasn’t as threatening a phrase without some kind of foreign accent. “What should I say?”

Blue sighed and crossed her arms. It wasn’t something that was supposed to be shared with anyone, as that defeated the whole purpose. But she didn’t want Adam to get worked up in his worry and do something stupid, compromising his own shaky safety.

“Fine,” she huffed. “Say, we found your son he’s alive.”

Joseph looked startled, which gave her a least some small scrap of satisfaction.

“I guess that worked,” Joseph noted, when the notifications abruptly stopped rolling in. “You and your boyfriend and your secret codes,” he jabbed a teasing finger at her. “How precious.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.” Blue had accepted this correction as her life’s fate to decree among the masses. “So do I get to know who I’m killing or is it a surprise?”

“Who said anything about killing someone?” Joseph balked at her. “How presumptuous. How triggering.”

“That’s what my power does,” Blue reminded him. “That’s _all_ it does. Kill kill kill. That’s me. Walking talking black death at your service.”

“Can you have an existential crisis on your own time? We have a job to do.” Joseph stopped in front of an obnoxiously large white mcmansion and led her up the path to the front door. She was prepared to be dazzled by some expert lock picking abilities, but Joseph reached for what Blue had only just noticed as a key attached to the end of a chain around his neck and slid it into the lock, turning it open with unimpressive ease.

“Is this,” Blue gaped at him in some kind of betrayal. “Your own goddamn house?”

“Don’t remind me,” Joseph stepped inside. “But he’s always changing the locks. Paranoid fucker. But this,” he dangled the key in front of her. “Was a good behavior present from Ronan. Opens any door I want it to.”

Blue wrinkled her nose. “That’s not possible.”

“Precisely,” Joseph agreed, then pressed his finger to his lips and motioned for her to follow him into a large dark kitchen with enviable marble countertops. He ripped open the refrigerator and beckoned her forth.

“Go on,” he whispered, nodding at the contents inside. “Get to work.”

“Excuse me?” Blue blinked at him.

“Rot all this shit with your magic death spit,” he explained like this was obvious and she was very simple.

“Are you telling me…” Animal crackers paint boy had officially been knocked down to second place on her List. “You brought me all this way to spoil a bunch of food? Just unplug the fridge!”

“That’s boring,” Joseph argued. “And doesn’t send the same message.”

Blue just gaped at him.

“Hurry up,” he hissed. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

After Blue had successfully ruined a month’s worth of food, shriveled every house plant, toxified a pool, and rusted all the metal they could find, Joseph instructed her to wait downstairs while he promised there was just “one more thing”.

When he returned, her heart stuttered in her chest. She knew about the tests Mr. Gray performed to try to learn as much about her power as he could. It made her sick, it always had. Even though she wasn’t there to see the lab rats untimely demises, she was still the source of their fatal misery.

The small ball of brown fluff in Joseph’s arms and the freak boy holding it were both looking at her expectantly.

She shook her head, bile rising in her throat. “I am not hurting an animal.”

Joseph screwed up his face like she’d just told an off color joke in mixed company. “What is it with you and murder? Get your rocks off later, Dahmer, we need to split before we wake daddy.”

Blue didn’t have time to process the entirety of that sentence so she stuck with what seemed like the most pressing.

“What? We’re leaving? What about…” she gestured helplessly toward the tiny chewbacca.

“As a wise woman once said,” Joseph shut the door behind them. “We’re taking the dog, dumbass.”

 

*******

Adam knew Blue was safe. She wouldn’t have used their emergency code unless she meant it. Not even in someone had tried to torture it out her. And yet, he still couldn’t sleep. Ronan had left the room for Adam to rest in alone with hardly any words beyond a promise that Blue would be back, unharmed, soon enough. Both of them were fried from their argument and all the everything else that had been too much for one night. It was Adam’s fault, really. He’d been so stupid he’d made himself sick. Mooning over a stranger just because he looked like…and wasn’t like…

He turned over in bed, fraught with self hatred. Blue had been right, he really did have a death wish.

A knock rapped against the door and Adam sprung up, hoping to see Blue standing there all in one piece, but instead there was no one. Adam frowned, wondering if he had officially lost his mind or if some stupid kids were playing a game, and almost shut the door before he noticed a large lump of something on the floor outside the door. He bent down to examine it more closely. It was a bunch of pasted together Bible pages, ripped at the edges as if they’d been freshly removed from their sacred resting place and crudely assembled this way. He was surprised that hotels actually still did that, the bible in the drawer thing. Especially in New York. Seemed like it should be something more relevant to the times, like a vegan recipe book. He picked up the bible-wrapped thing and brought it inside his dark room, impatiently tearing at the pages before he’d even made it back to the bed.

What?

The thing was clear, hard to tell if it was glass or plastic, and shaped like sort of like the domed top part of a blender, if he could compare it to anything he’d ever seen before. He fingered the dome and felt small dips in the maybe-glass-maybe-plastic, like tiny little holes had been poked into it.

What?

He turned it around in his hands a few times before realizing he was too psychologically exhausted to understand anything, and set the open edge down on the nightstand beside him.

Oh.

Suddenly the maybe-glass-maybe-plastic dome was lighting up and the shape of something inside it was forming. A long glowing green squiggly thing appeared, followed by springs of what looked like leaves appearing on either sides of it. The top of the green stem pulsed dark red and grew in size until the edges defined themselves into the shape of a blooming rose.

Oh.

Adam leaned forward, now understanding the reason for the holes at the top, because a warm, candle-like scent of rose was filling the air around it.

He stared at it in complete disbelief. It wasn’t like the one he’d seen at the store. The rose inside wasn’t a prettily shaped lightbulb that lit up with the touch of a button. It was somehow, impossibly, real. So real in fact that one of the petals eventually slipped from the bottom of the fully bloomed rose and floated softly to the top of the desk under which the dome was set. Adam tipped back the dome to reach for the fallen petal, surprised to see that in doing so, the light fizzled out until the flower disappeared from sight completely. The petal was gone too. He blinked. Had he imagined the whole thing? He looked down where the petal should be and saw that instead there was a small scrap of white paper. He slid his fingers underneath the tipped back dome to retrieve it.

Upon setting it back down, the whole process began again, until there was another, or perhaps the same, fully formed glowing rose inside the dome.

Heart pounding, he held up the paper to the light so he could see what had been scribbled inside it.

_I’m curious about you, too._

He sat there for a moment, then stood up so he could pull back the covers and put himself back into bed properly, turned so he could stare at his impossible night light, clutching the bit of paper so tightly in his fist he felt it going numb.

_Oh no_ , his brain sang at him, delirious with delight —as usual— to be in this kind of danger.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to everyone who has been interested in and supportive of this story. i know it's out there and different but it's been exciting and fascinating and therapeutic for me to write. that being said, the trigger warning i'm issuing for this chapter is that this is where you'll really start to see a stark and unapologetic depiction of how longterm abuse can negatively effect someone's perception of reality, themselves, emotions, desires, etc. Adam is on a Journey TM and it's a hard one. And also I realize it might be jarring to see Ronan and Adam's dynamic depicted as something not entirely healthy (at the moment), but rather than being angst just for the sake of it, in my opinion this is a realistic picture of two good-hearted but very damaged people trying to traverse an attraction to each other while being in the middle of their own individual battles to better themselves.

“Oh good,” a metallic, raspy sound ground out as Blue’s eyes grew less and less heavy. “You’re awake.”

She sat up and spun around, head spinning as consciousness returned to her. 

“Stop doing that,” she said the way you’d tell your sibling to move out of the way when they were in front of the television. It had lost its disorienting terror and been replaced with blood boiling annoyance. 

Joseph coughed and Blue squinted in the darkness, realizing suddenly they were not in motion, but pulled over halfway into the shoulder of the road. 

Blue stretched up out of her seat, blindly fingering at the ceiling of the car, fumbling for the light. When it finally clicked on, she wished it hadn’t. 

“Oh boy,” she breathed, taking in the sorry sight. An alarming amount of sweat shined the now sallow skin of the boy next to her, shadows gathered under his eyes in an incredibly unattractive way, which was saying something, since she was usually into that sort of thing. 

“I need my phone,” she spat with an inappropriate amount of venom, because she’d just remembered that he still had it. His veiny eyelids fluttered while his hand made some kind of aborted gesture of guidance. She growled in frustration because she refused to call it fear and wrenched herself around to dig through the backseat of the car. She gasped when her hands slid against something warm and….breathing? 

Oh yeah. The dog. She patted it absentmindedly, as none of this was its fault, and continued her blind search. 

“Blue.” 

The sound of her name sent a sobering chill up her spine, for some reason. When she turned back to face the boy in the driver’s seat, it became clear. She didn’t know him very well, or much at all, but she had spent a large amount of recent time with him and had more or less formed a solid opinion. The sight of him now did not fit into it. It wasn’t just that he was too weak to speak, and therefore be an asshole. It was the way all the muscles in his face were pulled loose, eyes drooping downward, completely devoid of a fight. He was supposed to be like one of those annoying comic relief characters in a movie that could have a bus thrown on them just to get up and shout ‘I’m okay!’ through bloody teeth. It didn’t seem possible, and yet, 

“You’re dying,” said Blue. Her mind started thinking several thoughts at once. Shamefully the one pulsing at the front of it was that she had no idea how to drive a stick shift and she’d soon be stuck in the middle of nowhere with a dog and a dead body and a car she couldn’t drive. 

He hissed. “Not…possible...unfortunately.” 

“Where’s my phone, Joseph.” she said it unlike a question, and used his name like she was scolding a child.

She watched his Adam’s apple dip down in his throat and bob back up again. He licked his lips and said, “Guess.” a

She gaped at him, all the guilty sympathy that had been filling her up deflated like a balloon popping in her chest. She growled and reached forward, unkindly pulling his bony hips up out of the seat and shoving him roughly into the window. She felt nothing but satisfaction at the sound of his forehead smacking into the glass, and pulled her phone triumphantly out of his back pocket. 

“Ow,” he complained, dropping back into the seat. He was smiling. 

Blue turned her attention to the screen in front of her, making a wish with every pound of her heart to _please pick up, please pick up_. 

The familiar sight of Mr. Gray’s angular, discerning face combined with the unfamiliar state of his….undresss…made Blue jump like a monster had appeared on the screen.

“Blue?” He was carding a hand through his hair, trying to flatten it down. 

“Oh my God,” Blue groaned, her stomach turning. “Are you with mom?” 

“What?” His eyes narrowed. “No. Why? What’s wrong with Maura?” 

“Nothing,” Blue blinked, she didn’t have time for this. “I need your help.” 

His face disappeared and the surroundings shuffled before righting themselves again. He reappeared in front of whatever his phone had been perched on, wrapped in a dark robe. 

“What’s going on?” 

Blue swallowed. She felt like she might cry. She definitely did not have time for that. 

“I infected someone.” 

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Gray’s response was predictably emotionless. “I’ll come and take care of it. Where are you?” 

Blue shook her head, though she did appreciate the gesture. “He’s still alive. I want you to take a look at the bite and see if there’s…anything to be done.” 

“I see,” he concluded, his voice pulled tighter than Blue had ever heard it. “Well, it’s only natural. You’re a young woman now, a lovely one at that, and I must admit I’ve always been prepared for—” 

“Oh my God!” Blue yelped, nearly dropping her phone as she wheeled it away from the aforementioned wound and back on herself. “No! Ew! No! Jesus, it—it was self defense!” 

His tone shifted from mortifyingly uncomfortable to cold-blooded business again. “Then what’s the problem?” 

Blue rolled her eyes. “It was a misunderstanding. It’s a long story.” 

“She’s being shy,” Joseph croaked up from where he sat reclined, dying. “Your daughter likes to play rough.” 

“I am _trying_ to keep you from dying!” Blue shrilled. “Would you rather I speed up the process?” 

Joseph shrugged, like it was all the same to him. 

“Blue,” Mr. Gray cleared his throat. “You and I both know there’s nothing to be done now. I’m sorry. I realize how upsetting this must be. But it’s not your fault. Tell me where you are and—”

“No,” Blue cut him off sternly. “You don’t understand. It’s been…God I don’t know…six hours at least…maybe more. And he’s _just_ starting to look bad.” 

Mr. Gray blinked at her, his downturned dusky eyes owlish in their lack of comprehension. 

“He’s Extra,” Blue explained hastily. “He can heal himself.” 

“Regenerate,” Joseph corrected around a dry cough. 

Blue grunted in annoyance. “What’s the difference?” 

“Monumental difference!” Mr. Gray exploded from inside her phone. “Everyone can heal themselves, Blue. The speed at which it’s done makes no difference when you’ve been poisoned on a cellular level. Not with what you’re packing, anyway.” 

Blue’s lips thinned. “Thank you for that.” 

“When you showed me the wound I assumed it was fresh,” Mr. Gray was buzzing with excitement now. “If it’s beens hours, his body must be keeping it from progressing.” 

“Exactly,” Joseph slumped over, into view of her phone’s camera. “Problem is, I’m stuck. It’s not getting worse, but it won’t get better.” 

“Fascinating,” Mr. Gray sighed wistfully. “I’d love to take a look at it in person.” 

“We can’t,” Blue spoke before Joseph could open his mouth. “We’re states away and I have to get back to Adam.” 

“Don’t tell me he’s with him.” Mr. Gray, who knew as much about Sam as Adam had allowed her to tell him, shifted smoothly into a gear he was supposed to be retired from. 

Blue heaved out an exhausted breath. “Not exactly.” 

“Blue, what exactly is going on?” 

“Um,” she said. “Turns out Sam is actually the clone of some other Extra named Ronan. He was created because apparently Ronan’s abilities are important to the government or something. I don’t know all the details about that. But he and his group tracked me and Adam down to gather intel about Sam so they find him and, you know, kill him.” 

“Oh,” Mr Gray said. “Well, alright. As long as you’re safe.” 

“What should we do?” Blue swung the conversation back to the situation at hand. “Is there any, I don’t know, drug or something that would help jumpstart his regeneration?” 

“Many, possibly,” Mr. Gray shrugged, one sleeve of his robe falling down his shoulder. "Then again, I have no idea how they would react with his biology, not to mention how the poison has altered it.” 

“Great.” 

“I can think of one option that bypasses those concerns, but that depends on how trustworthy this boy is.” 

Blue looked despondently toward Joseph, then back to her phone. “That’s to be determined.” 

“Well,” Mr. Gray folded his hands in front of him. “It’s up to you.” 

“Isn’t it always,” she deadpanned. “Fine. Okay. Whatever.” 

“Could you keep me on?” Mr. Gray sounded like a little boy asking for ice cream after dinner. “This could be vital to my reaserch.” 

Blue turned her phone to the side and propped it up on the dashboard of the car. She reached for Joseph’s hands and threaded his fingers between hers. 

“Um.” He said. 

“Shut up.” She closed her eyes. “I need to concentrate.” 

When it was over, she slumped back against her own seat, utterly drained of energy. 

“Amazing,” Mr. Gray chirped from somewhere far away. “Young man, could you give me a closer look?” 

“Call me K,” said a newly energized Joseph, which Blue still had enough strength to scowl at. 

They continued to chatter away, while Blue remained still and tried not to throw up. She’d never given someone so much before, and she was certain she was never going to again, if this is what the result was. 

Something was said about keeping in touch, recording the process, and then her phone was tossed into her lap. Her eyes flitted open. 

“Your dad’s kinda hot,” Joseph grinned at her. “Is he single?” 

"I should have let you die,” Blue mourned regretfully. 

“That’s a nifty little trick you got there,” Joseph noted in a loaded tone, starting up the car and pulling away from the side of the road. “And it works on anyone’s power? Hmmm.” 

“Should I even waste time begging you not to tell anyone?” 

Joseph had the audacity to look wounded. “You don’t think I can keep a secret?” 

Blue couldn’t muster up the energy for a retort, so she stayed quiet, letting her heavy eyelids fall half closed. 

Joseph flicked his eyes toward her. “You don’t look so good, baby doll. You wanna sleep it off?” 

At least he’d asked this time. Maybe they were making some kind of progress. She nodded weakly, barely aware of the press of his fingers against her temple before the lights went out. 

*******

Adam woke to the sight of Blue perched on the edge of the bed he lay in, watching him intently.

“Creepy,” he muttered, sleepily rubbing his eyes into focus. “How long have you been there?” 

“Way too long,” Blue crossed her arms, like she was annoyed with him. Adam found this ridiculous, considering the circumstances. She nodded toward the bedside table. “What the hell is that?” 

Adam turned to see the rose still lit up and floating in the domed glass, which meant the whole thing hadn’t been some PTSD-fueled fever dream, and quickly tipped it on its side, like he was covering an exposed part of his body.

“Nothing,” he cleared his throat. “Just Ronan showing off his power.” 

“Huh,” Blue clicked her tongue. “Looks like you had an interesting night.”

“You’re one to talk,” Adam scoffed at her. “What the hell, Blue? I was terrified.” 

Her tight expression fell. “I’m sorry. It’s not like it was a planned excursion.And it never would have happened if _you_ hadn’t gone off with Ronan without telling anyone. _I_ was fucking terrified.” 

“At least we both made it out in one piece?” Adam offered, waiting for Blue to confirm or deny this. 

“More or less,” she rolled her eyes. “Though I do kind of feel like Jim in _Gotham_ after he made a deal with The Penguin.” 

Adam pursed his lips in contemplation. “Seems more like a Riddler type to me.” 

“Whatever,” Blue sighed. “The point is that it’s definitely going to come back to haunt me, so can we get the fuck out of here?” 

“I don’t think they’re going to just let us go,” Adam said, desperately trying to squash the anxiety pulsing in his chest at the thought of leaving without getting to see Ronan again. He needed to thank him, at least. For the food last night. And the…gift. 

“You gave them what they wanted, didn’t you?” Blue gaped at him. “They can’t just keep us here. We’re leaving. Today.” 

“Whoa, relax.” Adam’s eyebrows scrunched together. He’d never seen Blue so…manic. She was practically shaking with adrenaline, her fingers drumming rapidly against her crossed legs, eyes darting around like she wasn’t aware she couldn’t keep them still. 

“Are you okay?” He tilted his head warily. “Did something…happen?” 

“What?” She narrowed her eyes in confusion, then widened them in understanding. “Oh My god. Really?” 

“Well you’re acting weird as fuck,” Adam accused, deflecting all his complicated emotions onto her. “And that guy’s obviously a fucking creep, so…” 

“He’s not,” Blue stopped short, seemingly surprised by her own words, then shook her head. “I mean, he’s not that bad. Nothing happened, Jesus, Adam. We—I—” She hesitated, like she was weighing whether or not to say what she was about to. “It was nothing.” 

Obviously there was something she wasn’t saying. But there were things Adam didn’t feel like saying right now either, so he let it go. 

“I just meant,” he said. “We should probably check in with them before we go. We don’t want them showing up again unannounced on us, do we?” 

“Definitely not,” Blue agreed, uncrossing her legs and hopping down from the bed. “Alright. Let’s get this over with.” 

*******

Paying for in-flight wifi was a new low. Even worse than telling Blue it was because he needed to work on his research paper and not because he wanted to be able to receive any incoming messages, should they be sent to him. 

Eventually, because he refused to have wasted the money, he had to take matters into his own hands. 

_What do you want to know?_

**?**

_You said you were curious about me…_

**lol**

**idk**

**u were dating a clone of me**

**brings up a lot of questions**

_such as?_

**idk like if it was just random or if he targeted you for a reason**

**and if so why**

:/ 

**what?**

_just yikes_

**yeah…**

Adam wasn’t a fan of where this conversation seemed to be going, and he didn’t really have a response nor did Ronan seem to be in want of one, so he took his attention elsewhere. 

**i feel bad**

**like im responsible for it in a way i guess**

**idk it’s hard to explain but i’m sorry that you got caught up in this and were hurt because of me**

**i just wanted to say that**

_I don’t feel like you owe me an apology but thanks I guess_

**lol**

**ok**

**:/**

_Do you always split up one sentence into 5 different messages or am I just getting special treatment?_

**u**

**r**

**a**

**d**

**i**

**c**

**k**

Adam sent an emoji of a yellow smiley face with its tongue sticking out. 

Ronan’s next message didn’t come until they were back on solid ground and shuttling back to their tiny, shitty apartment in a smelly, shitty uber. 

**also it’s just like weird to think about…idk…maybe im just being crazy but just looking at all the pictures of you and him together it’s just weird because it’s me but obviously not at all at the same time. i can’t help but wonder how similar we are and that freaks me out because he obviously sucks**

**i put that all in one message i hope ur happy**

Adam decided to let him wait until he was back home in his bed to answer. 

_From what I can tell, you’re nothing alike._

_You’re polar opposites._

**rly?**

**how?**

_I don’t know if I can explain it, just your vibes, I guess._

_The way you talk is totally different._

_Body language._

_Clothing._

_All that stuff._

**wow so many messages just for one sentence**

_Ha ha._

**i’m rly stressed out at the thought of someone who looks like me going around wearing ugly clothes…**

_Not ugly, just more basic. T-shirts and basketball shorts, etc._

**so….ugly.**

Adam sent an eye rolling emoji. 

**are u home yet?**

_yeah_

**did ur thing make it intact?**

_My….thing?_ Adam punctuated the message with two large sideways looking eyes.

**u know what im talking about**

_Maybe, but why can’t you say it?_

Ronan didn’t respond for awhile, and Adam took some sort of sick satisfaction out of making him uncomfortable. There were many flavors of being uncomfortable, and some of them were paradoxically pleasant. This seemed like one of those flavors. 

**the thing i made**

_Yeah, it’s fine._

This seemed a little unintentionally blasé, so he added: 

_It’sbeautiful._

_How did you do it?_

**wow i rly am**

**rubbing off on u**

**huh**

_Don’t wanna give up your secrets?_

**it’s just kind of impossible to explain**

_Try anyway._

**why?**

_Because I want to know._

**i have to have a really clear picture of what i want, and i have to want it**

**really really want it**

**and i just concentrate on that and it just kind of happens**

**that makes it sound super easy lol**

**it’s not**

_Hmmm._

**boring**

_No._

_Just trying to imagine it._

**you’re strange**

**not what i was expecting**

What exactly were you expecting? 

**i have no idea**

_Well I wasn’t expecting you at all so I guess we’re even_

**that doesnt make any sense**

_Neither do you._

Ronan didn’t text him again until two entire days later. 

**was it always bad?**

_I’m going to need you to be more specific, but given most of the ways I could interpret this, yeah probably._

**lol**

**i mean u and sam**

_Technically, I guess, yeah._

_But it didn’t always feel bad._

_If that makes sense._

**sort of**

**i guess i’m just wondering if like, was he just like constantly an asshole? or did he just have idk anger problems or something?**

**jesus sry thats dumb forget i said anything**

_It’s hard to remember things realistically. A lot of the memories are hazy and half-repressed and sometimes I don’t know if I’m downplaying how bad it was or making myself believe it was worse than it really was…so I don’t really know how to answer stuff like that._

**im sry** **it was a fucking stupid question**

**it just kind of freaks me out about myself and makes me wonder if i’m secretly a horrible person**

**like if i’m really capable of stuff like that**

_Most people are, I guess._

_I am._

_I just made a decision a long time ago not to ever act on my anger in a violent way._

**how’s that going for you?**

_Swell._

Blue was still acting weird. Adam had thought for certain that once they were back home she’d spill about what really went down between her and Slenderman that night. She didn’t bring it up, though, and continued not to until Adam had to do it for her. It had resulted in a wildly unexpected argument in which Blue twisted Adam’s reasonable concern into invasive distrust. He’d even felt bad about it until he realized he’d been unfairly manipulated. She really didn’t want him to know whatever she was keeping from him. Unfortunately for Blue, she was tragically easy to read. He knew she hadn’t been hurt, and he knew she wasn’t having some torrid affair, either. But something….weird…had happened. And seemed to be still happening, considering the amount of time Blue spent locked in her room talking on the phone, allegedly to her mother and Mr. Gray. It would be a perfect opportunity, Adam also knew, to contact Ronan. Their texting conversation had died down after a few weeks. Adam got busy with school and Ronan’s replies became shorter and farther apart until they stopped altogether. The itch was not constant, but when it came upon him, it was nearly unbearable. At least he finally had an excuse to scratch. 

_Something weird happened with Blue and that guy._

**what guy?**

_Your creepy friend._

**extremely need you to be more specific lmao**

_The one that kidnapped her._

**oh**

_She won’t talk about it and it’s stressing me out._

_Has he said anything?_

**no**

**he did bring a dog back tho**

**idk if that helps**

A dog did not fit into any of Adam’s theories and he was devastated to return to the drawing board. 

_Why wouldn’t he say anything about it?_

**i don’t know, but like…if you’re worried about your friend’s innocence or whatever**

**i do not think she is his type**

_That’s not what I’m worried about._

But it was a relief, all the same. 

_I think she got into something shady with him and she’s been freaked out about it ever since. Like, I don’t know. Like she feels guilty or something._

**oh well yeah, that’s very possible**

**i guess i can ask him if you want**

Adam suddenly felt very ridiculous. Maybe Blue had been right and he was being a paranoid piece of shit. And now he’d wrapped Ronan up into it, for what reason? Had he invented his own emotional state simply because he wanted an excuse to talk to him? Nothing seemed unlikely at this point. 

Ronan took Adam’s silence for confirmation and sent him a screenshot of a text conversation between him and the aptly named contact “Bitch”. 

“so what happened with you and that blue girl?” read the text inside the blue bubble. 

The grey one underneath it contained one damning word. “Who?” 

Adam promptly gave up life as a detective and focused instead on controlling his own insane thoughts and severely fucked up emotions. This new life plan involved talking to Ronan as often as possible, as to wear off the novelty of it, and steady the precarious dynamic between them. 

This, ultimately, did not work. 

And it all came to a boiling point one night when many things were said that should not have been and Adam had gone to sleep buzzing with satisfaction and regret and woken up to a text the next day that said, 

**so…i don’t think we should do that again.**

Adam was surprised, for some reason. That was the worst part. 

_Why?_

**this has just gotten really unhealthy**

**for me**

**and probably for you too**

**i’m sorry**

**it’s my fault**

_Okay._

**okay?**

**that’s all u have to say?**

_What would you like me to say?_

**just what you’re feeling…**

_I’m not feeling anything_

**alright**

**well if you ever start feeling something, feel free to let me know**

That was the last Adam heard from Ronan. 

That is, until he showed up uninvited in the middle of the night, shaking Adam awake from a dead sleep. 

“Jesus Christ,” Adam panted, clutching his chest like he had to hold his pounding heart inside of it. “What the hell are you doing here?” 

Ronan looked at him for a long, strange moment. He leaned back, rested his hands in his lap. He looked away from Adam, and startled—of course—at the telling mess of shattered glass scraped up into the far corner of the room. 

“What happened there?” 

Adam exhaled a hard breath. “I was angry.” 

“At me?” Ronan asked. 

“Myself,” Adam answered. 

“I need to talk to you,” Ronan seemed fidgety, nervous. “But not here.” 

“Why not here?” 

“So many questions,” Ronan scoffed. “Classic.” 

Adam shifted uncomfortably in bed. 

“What do you need to talk to me about?” 

Ronan sat there, not saying anything, for a long stretch of time. Adam catalogued his smudgy profile in the dark, and wondered briefly if this was really happening or if he was still, in fact, asleep. 

“I want to explain some things,” Ronan finally said. He shrugged. “And I missed you.” 

Adam dressed himself quickly and followed Ronan quietly out of the apartment and toward a sleek vehicle that Adam tried to weave into his understanding of what made up a Ronan. 

He slid silently into the passenger seat, sleepy eyes still adjusting to the world around him, staring straight ahead as they sped through the night, waiting for him to say something. He turned to him, eyes catching on the bare slope of his shoulders visible through the loose fitting tank top he wore. He looked and looked until he realized exactly what it was he was looking at, which was bare clean skin that had absolutely no traces of ink anywhere on it. 

He said, “Holy shit.” 

Sam turned to him sharply, one dark eyebrow arched up in question. “What?” 

Adam floundered for just a moment, flicked his eyes to the glowing clock that read 4:21 AM on the dashboard, then back to Sam. “It’s Blue,” he lied easily. “She’s been out of town. I’m supposed to pick her up from the airport in like an hour.” 

Sam was predictably not happy with this. 

“You couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?” 

“I didn’t realize what time it was,” Adam explained. “I wasn’t thinking. You…surprised me.” 

“I thought I saw her car in the parking lot,” Sam said, in a tone that was clear this was not a mere thought but a known fact. 

“Yeah,” Adam agreed. “We share it.” 

“Well,” Sam said after a moment of steely deliberation. “This won’t take long.” 

“I’ll text her,” Adam offered, supremely grateful his phone had already been stuffed into the pocket of the hoodie he’d chosen to throw on. “Just in case I end up running late.” 

“What are you going to say?” Sam wanted to know, as he couldn’t very well tell her the truth, as far as Sam knew. Adam swallowed and weighed his options. If he lied and Sam found out, historically that scenario went very badly. Then again, it was likely Sam already had something very bad in mind regardless of what Adam did or didn’t do. 

“I’ll just tell her I had an early lab and I might be running a bit late,” he said as he typed out SOS SOS LITERAL EMERGENCY I AM IN A CAR WITH SAM I DONT KNOW WHAT HE WANTS AND I HAVE TO PUT MY PHONE IN AIRPLANE MODE NOW BUT IF YOU DON’T HEAR FROM ME IN MORE THAN AN HOUR, THAT MEANS SOMETHING BAD HAPPENED. 

He felt awful knowing how Blue would feel getting the worst nightmares of texts from him, especially since she was probably still asleep and not going to wake up in time to do anything about it. Maybe it was more trouble than it was worth. Maybe his odds were better placed elsewhere. Maybe he was a pathetic idiot or maybe he really was just thinking of Blue’s sanity, but he highlighted the whole block of text and deleted it, pasting it instead into his long dead conversation with Ronan and hit send. 

** *** **

Adam hadn’t known he and Blue had been followed home for close monitoring, but maybe he’d suspected it on some subconscious level. It made his decision to alert Ronan of his situation a fractional amount less stupid that way, so he ran with it. And it made the shock of seeing the casual bane of his existence chilling on the ikea sofa he had paid good hard-earned money for with his feet propped up on the antique wooden coffee table in front of it, smoking a cigarette. 

“Hey, you’re alive,” Joseph greeted him genially. “Mazels.” 

He didn’t have time to react to that because Blue was throwing herself into his arms like a freshly widowed Victorian woman. She squeezed herself around him painfully tight and he let her without complaint. 

She sobbed into his neck. “Are you okay?” 

“I’ll tell you when I find out.” 

“Do not joke right now,” She pulled back from him so she could shove him in the chest. “What happened? How did he…? I don’t understand.” 

Adam sighed, utterly exhausted.

“Save the story for the rest of the kids,” Joseph interrupted, butting out his cigarette on one of Adam’s favorite coasters. “Unless you wanna tell it twice.” 

Adam did not, so they made their way to another hotel to be questioned. Henry and Noah had been relatively close by in New York, Gansey and Ronan had been about the same flight time away down south, so by the time they arrived at their intended meeting destination, everyone was present and ready to interrogate. 

“You should have gone after him,” Gansey admonished Joseph after all the facts had been laid out. He wheeled around on Adam. “You seriously can’t even remember what kind of car it was?” 

“Hey,” Blue said. “Fuck you.” 

“It was dark,” Adam repeated. “And my mind was a little preoccupied.” 

“I’m sorry,” Gansey pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “But this is incredibly frustrating.” 

“We know he’s been staying in DC,” Noah recounted with optimism. “And we know he doesn’t know that we’re looking for him. We’re ahead of him, so that’s good news.”

“Noah, none of that was true,” Gansey scoffed dismissively. “He’s playing a cat and mouse game with us, obviously.” 

Noah shrank back into the couch and Henry extended a polite index finger. “I’m gonna second that fuck you, dude.” 

Gansey looked bewildered at his critics. Adam wasn’t bothered by his curt frustration. If Adam were in his position and the most important person in his life had an evil double of themselves running around, he wouldn’t really care much about anyone else’s feelings either. 

“Why did you go with him?” Ronan spoke for the first time since they’d arrived. “Your text made it seem like he’d taken you against your will.” 

“Well, it was under fraudlent terms,” Adam scoffed. Then, surprised to realize Ronan didn’t seem to understand, he had to say out loud: “I thought he was you.” 

No one quite knew what to say to that. Ronan just stared, squinty-eyed, like he was trying to solve a math problem, before turning briskly on his heels and walking out the door. 

“Awkward,” Joseph noted. 

He ran through all the details of what he could remember, again, trying to appease Gansey’s thirst for information. He thought the car might be a Lexus, but he couldn’t say that for sure. And it was either black, or dark blue or maybe possibly green. But definitely dark. He was insisting for the third time that Sam had seemingly only wanted to talk about his relationship with Adam and not any clones of himself he was looking to dispose of when a boy walked into the room that Adam hadn’t seen before and he stopped mid-sentence to eye him curiously. The rest of the room followed suit and Henry gasped in abject horror. 

“No!” He cried. "Not the curls!” 

“Thank God,” Joseph countered. “That awful beard is gone.” 

It was then that Adam realized he had seen this boy before, because this boy was Ronan, except as had been pointed out, his wild mane of curly black hair and just short of unkempt beard had disappeared, both shaved frighteningly clean. 

Ronan rubbed at his freshly shorn scalp. “There’s one problem solved,” he shrugged, then nodded toward Adam. “Can I talk to you? Alone?” 

Adam shouldn’t have been so eager to leave Blue alone with these people again, but there were things he needed to say to Ronan and just Ronan too. He got up, silently, just as he’d done with Sam, and followed him out the door. 

** *** **

Without all that rugged, tousled, and as it turned out, extremely distracting hair to cover it up, Ronan’s face was really something to behold. Adam knew he and Sam were genetically identical, and that if Sam copied Ronan’s makeover, they would once again be indistinguishable, but currently there was no possible way he could even imagine a physical resemblance between them. Ronan’s nose, for instance, seemed much larger, sharper, bird-like. And while most men sported year-round beards to cover up baby faces and weak chins, Ronan’s jaw was cut like marble. The naked, angular planes of his cheekbones combined with the lack of hair around his pouty pink lips simultaneously made him look older and younger. He looked like a moving puzzle, a trick of the light. Something not entirely human. The kind of guy Adam would have glanced at across a bar and thought, _yikes, not my type,_ but would have burned hot for his attention, anyway. 

“What?” The sound of a car unlocking echoed Ronan’s voice. He looked up at Adam, expectantly, who had stopped a few feet behind him, a little dazed at the way history was so quickly repeating itself. 

“Just a little triggering, that’s all.” Adam joked. Ronan didn’t find it funny. 

He leaned forward, arms crosed on the top of his car. It was a silver, shark-nosed BMW, and made much more sense than the black-blue-green maybe-Lexus. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, which made Adam want to punch something. 

“If this is about the weird self-serving savior fantasy you have about me, I can just go back inside.” 

Ronan sighed, pushed himself off from where he was leaning and turned around so he wasn’t facing Adam anymore. 

“Guess I deserved that.” 

“I’m not doing this,” Adam told him. “Whatever this is.” 

"Okay,” said Ronan. 

Adam wasn’t done, though. 

“And if I wanted to feel like being punished for something I didn’t do, I’d just go back to Sam.” 

Ronan turned back around for that. “That one’s not fair. I wanted to talk about it. You didn’t.” 

“Because you made me feel like it was my fault.” 

“I literally said it was mine.” 

“Doesn’t matter,” Adam argued, though the reminder made him feel like a bit of an idiot. “It’s how you made me feel.” 

“I’d apologize for that,” Ronan replied, not entirely kind. “But you tend to spontaneously combust when I do.” 

“I’m just not interested in your pity,” Adam scoffed, crossing his own arms in front of his chest. 

Ronan shook his head, like he was so over Adam’s general existence. 

“You’re right,” he said, spreading his hands wide apart as he spoke. “What I was doing was fucked up. I don’t think I really realized exactly what I was doing until it was too late, but who gives a shit about that? I was using you to try to prove something to myself. I didn’t mean to, but I did. And I’m sorry.” 

It was what Adam already knew, but hearing Ronan say it out loud so plainly stung like an ice pick shoved into his chest. 

“I was using you, too,” Adam said eventually, partially to feel less _like this_ and partially because he’d just realized it was true. “I liked that you weren’t him, but I wanted you to be him. I think I was pretending you _were_ him, in a weird way. It was never about you.”

Ronan looked as if he was having a similar sort of unsurprisingly painful experience. 

“On the bright side,” Adam noted with a self-deprecating shrug, “That’s better than the alternative.” 

Ronan squinted one eye. “What’s that?” 

“That I was crushing on my ex-boyfriend’s clone and you were hot for your clone’s ex boyfriend.” Adam explained. “That’s way more embarrassing than just being a fucked up narcissist.” 

Ronan laughed, but there was no heat to it. 

“I guess so.” 

“Does that cover the talk you wanted to have with me?” 

“Not really,” Ronan admitted coolly. “But you seem done, so.” 

“I think I went with Sam because somehow I knew it was him,” Adam gave his own admission. “And after all this shit, there’s still something in me that wants to go with him.” 

“Makes sense,” Ronan said, tracing an abstract pattern with his finger into the side of his car. 

“Does it?” Adam laughed humorlessly. 

Ronan shrugged. “I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it makes sense.” 

“But once I was in that car with him, alone, it was like…” Adam shook his head, baffled more than anything else. “I was just afraid. I wanted to get as far away from him as possible.” 

“And now?” Ronan’s slate blue eyes seemed to be glowing in the dark. 

“I don’t know,” Adam said. “I don’t like the way he makes me feel, but I miss him when he’s gone.” 

“You know we’re planning on killing him,” said Ronan, which seemed like a strange depature in topic. 

“Yes?” 

“Do you have a problem with that?” 

Adam was surprised by the question. “Why would I?” 

“He was your boyfriend,” Ronan said. “And you still have feelings for him.” 

“Feelings I don’t want,” Adam amended. “Feelings that aren’t good for me.” 

“I guess it depends,” Ronan mused, looking skyward. “On how powerful he is. Maybe he doesn’t need to die.” 

“It’d be better,” Adam spoke slowly, logically, “for everyone involved, if he was dead.” 

“You think?” Ronan’s tone was deadly serious, so Adam could only respond in kind. 

“When I left my parents’ house, I thought I was done living in fear,” he told Ronan. “And then I met Sam and it just started all over again. And then I got away from him and things started to get a little bit better, and then I met you.” 

“Me?” Ronan seemed surprised by his inclusion in the narrative. “You’re afraid of me?” 

“No,” Adam decided in the moment. “That’s the problem.” 

“Anyway,” Adam sucked in a chilling breath, bored of Ronan’s silence. “What did _you_ want to talk about?” 


End file.
